Briefly Noted

The Guts, by Roddy Doyle (Viking). In the decades since Jimmy Rabbitte got together the Commitments, the band that, in Doyle’s first novel, brought American soul music to nineteen-eighties Dublin, he has carved out a grand life for himself. He has a lovely, intelligent wife, great kids, and a neat job helping long-lost Irish bands make money off their cult status. But when a cancer diagnosis makes him confront his mortality, his comfortable existence threatens to come apart. Although the novel leans heavily on staples of midlife crisis (an extramarital affair, reconnection with old friends), Doyle’s dialogue and his depictions evoke the warmth and vigor of a complicated but joyful family life.

Famous Writers I Have Known, by James Magnuson (Norton). In this satire of the creative-writing industry, Frankie Abandonato, a con man on the run from mobsters, poses as a Salingeresque novelist at an M.F.A. program. The program is bankrolled by Rex Schoeninger, a writer (modelled on James Michener) who has grown rich from decades of potboilers and wants to redeem his literary reputation through educational philanthropy. Schoeninger also hopes to patch up an old feud with the reclusive novelist whom Abandonato is impersonating; Abandonato hopes to scam Schoeninger out of his remaining money. The book’s best jokes come at the expense of the fiction students, but it’s not all inside-baseball japery. The unexpected rapport between Frankie and Rex, orphans and absentee fathers both, stands out amid the fun.

Careless People, by Sarah Churchwell (Penguin Press). “Gatsby lives in the conditional mood, as aspirants must,” Sarah Churchwell writes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous character—and her impressionistic study of “what was in the air” as Fitzgerald conceived of “The Great Gatsby” relies, in part, on a series of what-ifs. Her most far-reaching supposition concerns the murder, in New Brunswick, in 1922, of two lovers, both married to other people. Could this headline-grabbing scandal have inspired “Gatsby”? Churchwell calls the case a suggestive “phantom double,” but offers scant evidence. The book is less a history than an evocation of the mood and tone of Fitzgerald’s milieu, taking on the uncertain, almost surreal animating spirit of its subject.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, by Artemis Cooper (New York Review Books). A dismal performance in school left the young Leigh Fermor with few job prospects. Instead, he took a yearlong walk across Europe, which culminated in a four-year affair with a Romanian princess. From there he rarely stopped moving: his true talents, it turned out, were for travelling and for writing about it. Cooper’s biography is affectionate but not uncritical, and she ably meets the challenge of adding further intrigue to journeys and adventures, such as his kidnapping of a Nazi general on the island of Crete in 1944, that her subject has already recounted so well. Elusive and often coy, the Fermor who emerges from these pages seems so authentic that when he dies, at ninety-six, the reader feels the loss keenly.